Sous la douche, le ciel

Shower Power |
2018 | documentary | 85' | FR, ST: EN/NL

In Brussels, a group of residents embarks on a five-year quest to find, purchase and renovate a home for a sanitary facility which would restore the dignity of the city's most vulnerable dwellers and lift up their spirits. Confronted with the political reality of the city, their undertaking unfolds as a real nail-biter.Shower Power chronicles a struggle, a long and arduous road leading from an idea to its concretization. It celebrates imagination as a driver of civil action in the face of political timidity and narrowing horizons.

In Brussels, a group of residents embarks on a five-year quest to find, purchase and renovate a home for a sanitary facility which would restore the dignity of the city's most vulnerable dwellers and lift up their spirits. Confronted with the political reality of the city, their undertaking unfolds as a real nail-biter.Shower Power chronicles a struggle, a long and arduous road leading from an idea to its concretization. It celebrates imagination as a driver of civil action in the face of political timidity and narrowing horizons.

Sous la douche, le ciel follows the Brussels non-profit organisation DoucheFLUX, during five years (2012-2017) in their efforts to set up a building dedicated to public showers and other hygiene services, desperately needed in Brussels, especially by the big homeless and precarious populations. This building, which will be located just off Brussels’ main train station, is meant to be beautiful, well-designed, functional and comfortable, a place from where one goes out head and spirit lifted.This initiative encounters difficulties and obstacles on many levels, not only because its members are non-professionals, precarious and non-precarious alike, but first and foremost because of the manyfold controversial nature of their proposal: it claims the visibility of poverty - in total opposition to common European city policy, it claims the primordiality of luxury - self image, self estime and human dignity being as important as survival, and it interferes with the State’s traditional social responsibility.

The film is a chronicle of a struggle. It follows a long and tortuous road from an idea to its concretisation. It raises the question of the political force of imagining a different reality and the possibility to act as a simple citizen, despite the very limited space capitalism, bureaucracy and political power have left us.

Sous la douche, le ciel follows the Brussels non-profit organisation DoucheFLUX, during five years (2012-2017) in their efforts to set up a building dedicated to public showers and other hygiene services, desperately needed in Brussels, especially by the big homeless and precarious populations. This building, which will be located just off Brussels’ main train station, is meant to be beautiful, well-designed, functional and comfortable, a place from where one goes out head and spirit lifted.This initiative encounters difficulties and obstacles on many levels, not only because its members are non-professionals, precarious and non-precarious alike, but first and foremost because of the manyfold controversial nature of their proposal: it claims the visibility of poverty - in total opposition to common European city policy, it claims the primordiality of luxury - self image, self estime and human dignity being as important as survival, and it interferes with the State’s traditional social responsibility.

The film is a chronicle of a struggle. It follows a long and tortuous road from an idea to its concretisation. It raises the question of the political force of imagining a different reality and the possibility to act as a simple citizen, despite the very limited space capitalism, bureaucracy and political power have left us.